Unanimous AI Founder Dr. Louis Rosenberg is Featured Speaker at TEDxKC, on NPR

“So here we are…the most intelligent species on Earth. Congratulations. Unfortunately, things are about to change,” Louis Rosenberg, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Unanimous AI

On Friday night, Dr. Rosenberg addressed the sold-out crowd of more than 4,000 attendees gathered for the ninth annual TEDxKC event. TEDxKC – the largest TED event in North America – was hosted on Friday, August 18, at the Kauffman Center for Performing Arts in Kansas City, Mo.

Reflecting this year’s TEDxKC theme — “Perspective: Where You Stand Matters” — Rosenberg challenged attendees to consider the valid fears of artificial intelligence while offering a new perspective on a new form of AI modeled after swarms in nature. Swarm AI offers humans an opportunity to amplify their collective intelligence, not replace it — and it may be the key to keeping humanity human.

Our next evolutionary pressure point
Rosenberg warned of “an alien intelligence headed towards us at breakneck speeds,” but unlike some imagine, this alien isn’t rocketing through space. Rather, he said it will be born right here on earth, a sentient A.I. that will emerge from a research lab where billions of dollars are being invested to create artificial brains made of billions of artificial neurons. “An alien will arrive and it will be smarter than us. And when that happens, it will be our next big evolutionary pressure point — one that will require us to get smarter, much smarter, or lose our position as the top intelligence in our environment.”

So what do we do?
Rosenberg has been personally concerned about this sentient A.I. ever since he took his first course in artificial neural networks as a Stanford University graduate student more than two decades ago. He didn’t think there was a solution until he asked this question: “How have other species handled evolutionary pressures where they needed to get smarter…fast?”

It turns out, the answer goes all the way back to the birds and the bees. And fish. And ants.
All of these creatures have evolved methods of amplifying their intelligence by “thinking together” in systems. This is why birds flock, and fish school, and bees swarm — they’re smarter together than alone. The hive mind is nature’s way of aggregating diverse perspectives in a population and finding the best solution for the group, maximizing wisdom.

But what about humans?
Rosenberg acknowledged that humans haven’t done a very good job of combining diverse views. “We aggregate perspectives by taking votes, polls, and surveys. The fact is, polls are polarizing. They drive humans to entrench, exposing and reinforcing our differences, but not helping us find common ground.”

How can we amplify our intelligence now?
With more than 25 years of research and development in human-computer interaction, Rosenberg asked the perspective-alerting question: Why can’t we create new interfaces and algorithms to connect people into artificial swarms, modeled after swarms in nature?

“I’m not talking crowdsourcing like we humans do with polls and surveys. I’m talking about forming systems: real-time systems, with feedback loops so deeply interconnected that a new intelligence forms, an emergent intelligence with its own personality and intellect. I’m talking about forming a ‘hive mind.’”

Rosenberg — a prolific inventor, scientist, entrepreneur and AI expert who was recently featured on National Geographic’s YEAR MILLION series — recently developed a new form of AI aimed at amplifying human intelligence, not replacing it. Known as Swarm AI, the new technology combines real-time human insights and AI algorithms to produce “hive minds” modeled after natural swarms for humans to converge on optimized insights, predictions and decisions. Swarm AI taps not only our collective human knowledge but also our values, morals, and sensibilities to create a super-intelligence that will be inherently aligned with our interests.

In 2015, Rosenberg launched Unanimous AI, a Silicon Valley company that has pioneered Swarm AI technology to enable people to form real-time swarms online. The system, known as UNU, has made headlines recently for correctly predicting the Kentucky Derby Superfecta, the Oscars, the Super Bowl, and even the rise of Donald Trump.

“It turns out human swarms are smart. In fact, they’re smarter than we ever expected. By swarming, groups average about 130% amplification in intelligence over the individuals who comprise it,” he said. “By thinking together using Swarm AI, we might be able to finally solve the hardest problems we face – poverty, inequality, sustainability of our very world.”

About Louis Rosenberg, Ph.D. Louis Rosenberg, Ph.D., was recently named A.I. Person of the Year by the Global AI Achievement Awards for developing Swarm AI technology, hailed by the award committee as “…the single best hope we have for keeping humans relevant in an A.I. dominated future.” As the founder of Unanimous A.I., Rosenberg was featured as an A.I. expert in the recent National Geographic series, YEAR MILLION. The BBC also Rosenberg in a special feature: Why Bees Could be the Secret to Superhuman Intelligence. Rosenberg earned his PhD from Stanford University, where his doctoral work resulted in the first immersive Augmented Reality system ever built (Virtual Fixtures platform for U.S. Air Force). Rosenberg is well known as a prolific inventor, having been awarded over 350 patents worldwide for his work in human-computer interaction. He was previously founder and CEO of Immersion Corporation, a pioneering Virtual Reality established in 1993. Rosenberg has also been a tenured professor at California State University (Cal Poly).

PHOTO CREDIT: Don Ipock

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